When the pub manager gives Kryten and Rimmer a telling off in backwards speak, what he is really saying is "You are a stupid, square-headed bald git, aren't you, eh?" I'm pointing at you, I'm pointing at you, but I'm not actually addressing you, I'm addressing the one prat in the entire country who's bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I'm saying. What a poor, sad life he's got!"
Craig Charles almost drowned during the filming of a scene where he walks out of a lake. He had weights in his pockets to keep him from floating upwards but got his foot caught in mud while underwater. No one realized until the cameras started rolling and he failed to emerge. A quick rescue operation was mounted and he was fine.
The Star Wars-esque crawl text at the beginning of this episode explains what after the end of the second series, but most of it goes by too fast to read. It says: "RED DWARF III THE SAGA CONTINUUMS The Story So Far... Three million years in the future, Dave Lister, the last human being alive, discovers he is pregnant after a liaison with his female self in a parallel universe. His pregnancy concludes with the successful delivery of twin boys, Jim and Bexley. However, because they were conceived in another universe, with different physical laws, they suffer from highly accelerated growth rates, and are both eighteen years old within three days of being born. In order to save their lives, Lister returns them to the universe of their origin, where they are reunited with their father (a woman), and are able to lead comparatively normal lives. Well, as normal as you can be if you've been born in a parallel universe and your father's a woman and your mother's a man and you're eighteen years three days after your birth. Shortly afterwards, Kryten, the service mechanoid who had left the ship after being rescued from his crashed vessel, the Nova 5, is found in pieces after his space bike crash lands onto an asteroid. Lister rebuilds the 'noid, but is unable to recapture his former personality. Meanwhile, Holly, the increasingly erratic Red Dwarf computer, performs a head sex change operation on himself. He bases his new face on Hilly, a female computer with whom he'd once fallen madly in love. And now the saga continuums AND NOW THE SAGA CONTINUUMS... RED DWARF III THE SAME GENERATION -NEARLY-"
The 2 disc series 3 DVD has a bonus feature that shows the whole episode backwards, therefore all the backwards sequences play forwards and the backwards dialogue can be heard properly (although some bits are still backwards).
This is the first time that the shuttlecraft Starbug is seen; it is much larger than the previous Blue Midget seen in the show, and indeed whole future series (VI and VII) would be set on Starbug. Backwards also makes it clear that there a number of Starbugs aboard Red Dwarf, which is just as well since they are frequently crashed.